Dev Chat Recap - 4/15/13 (Chris & Richard on maps, PVP, housing, more)

Here is a summary of today's impromptu dev chat.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ezBHobrJhow&feature=youtu.be


- Considering replacing the cloud fog of war with a 'cloth map' overlay, so as you walk along the map it will become rich and detailed but you will only see the 'cloth map' style for the places you have not yet been to.

- The map will be big, but they are not looking for realistic long distance travel time on the overland map.

- Travel will be hazardous, but will not take as much time as it would take to physically walk across the world. The world will be doubled with each expansion and they don't want it to be tedious.

- You can not simply pop across the map unless you use the lunar rifts (which will be important for island to island or continent to continent) but even those will take planning and time to use.

- There will be things walking around on the overland map (larger mobs - some friendly, some hostile)

- Going to try to get monthly game builds out (gameplay, screenshots). May take a while to progress on the art since they do not have their art team in place and want to settle on the story first. Trying to get some milestone progress videos every 2 weeks.

- It is likely you may encounter something that is beyond your level on the map. You can debate whether you want to take on the higher level areas, vs. everything automatically being scaled to your level.

- Merchandise sales WILL count towards stretch goals. They will release new stretch goals soon (and will take cost of goods into account when creating the stretch goals.)

- They are still handling SotA site registrations so they are extending the current tiers til at least Wednesday night and will re-evaluate then. They are opening the store once it is all settled.

- They will monitor the different online play modes to make sure no one swaps between SPO/FPO and OPO to grief or cheat.

- They want to allow you to place items in your house wherever you want (vs. set slots)

- They don't think they will need to restrict the same houses being built close together because the types of houses are vast and the places to put them are as well. It is up to the community to figure out how to handle it.

- They are thinking of a 'scoring' system for scenarios.. example, what time you take to complete it, what secret things you find, etc. so you can compare ranking to friends. They will test to see if players like it.

- You will only be able to get PVP contraband quests and high level resource area scenarios in OPO. You will not be able to switch to escape. They will make sure what rewards you get are comparable to what you can get in SPO/FPO but they will have more trophy/prestige/achievement. So it will be more vanity than power gain.

- There are times in the story where having a 1-on-1 relationship with a character in the story will be important and you will be pulled aside away from your friends for a moment (but will not happen very often)


- PKs will be able to own homes.

- Lord British will be in the game as an NPC to advance the story. When RG himself is playing, he will roam around. When he logs off, NPC will return.

- Richard deeply believes the story he is crafting will make everyone comfortable with the idea of protecting newbies from harm, and also embracing danger within the story. He feels people will want to take risks given the nature of the story. They are trying to satisfy both UO players and single player Ultima players.

- Death penalties - still being discussed- New possible idea - Dante's inferno-like scenario where you need to play through based on the ways you've failed in the virtues. If you have no death penalty - it takes the excitement out of adventuring. They are going to experiment.

- Darkness, weather, astronomy all matter immensely in the story. Daylight, light sources favor the good. Darkness, nighttime favor the bad. Weather similarly have effects on resources, and the kinds of mobs that appear. Planetary alignments as well.

- They are looking to parallel cooking with alchemy by giving buffs for food, etc.

 

Thanks for the summary
It was so sudden I totally missed it, watching the recorded video as I type this

 

I was looking just for this! Many thanks!

 

thanks a lot =)

 

Lori, you are just great!

 

Excellent ! Thank you Madame !

 

Great! Thanks for the effort. I really like and watched all the video hangouts, but it would be great having a summary for each video. Like this recap with all the major bullet points, this would be enough.

@LB
What have you eaten? Was it crisps and cheese? I got appetite as well. It rustled a bit during your video conversation, but it was very amusing

 

Cheers Lori. Couldn't be there for the live broadcast. Good chat, going to go see the debate on forums now!

 

Thanks Lori, for being virtuous again and provide this summary to us .



Join us: http://mgt470.enjin.com/

 

Thanks Dame Lori!

 

You're welcome everyone! Glad it helped.

 

Also just wanted to post the link video from Dom John http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EFwjendP2IU

 

The real question dealing with the fog of war is how naive is the character of the world he lives in when he begins his journey from the starting city. Does he start with a map of the world or does he draw or acquire his map as he travels? How prevalent are maps in the world? Does our character only know the area just beyond his local starting city where he group or not?

So this gives us two choices initially either we are completely naive of the world beyond our starting city or we have some information be it a map or more. Now in either case we are definitely not going to know the world we live in to the high fidelity graphics shown. Either we know nothing of the world beyond our starting area and it needs to be hidden in some form or we have a map that lets us know sort of what the world looks like. Now ancient maps were not high quality and were not very accurate. They were good enough to get you an idea of where you were going though.

I am of the opinion that maps are relatively prevalent in the world due to the number of people that are going to have cloth maps showing us what the world looks like. In addition maps have to be relatively prevalent for the many commoners to be able to acquire them as framed items for their houses.

Now why did our character decide to leave the confines of his starting city. Maybe he acquired a map of the world or some surrounding area beyond his starting city. Now even though maps exist, that does not mean they are totally accurate as mentioned before. Dom John's suggestion is that you start out with the overland as low quality detail of the level of the map makes sense. You are going to have an idea of general direction to various cities and geographic features. The map could start out as just rough hand drawn depictions of where everything is located. As you travel the world you would have the chance to update the map with better data and the high quality rendering of the overland then makes sense as you update the map.

Of course things change over time the longer you are away from them. Does that mean that the overland should degrade back to the hand drawn map? I would say no. You have had a chance to update the map, but that does not mean you have completely forgotten the distances to the various cities and geographic features.

So how do you deal with the overland that you have not been to recently? My suggestion is to darken that map or overlay it with a simple gray layer to indicate that you are not familiar with the changes going on in that part of the world. This is used in many RTS and turn based games like Starcraft or Civilization. You have an idea of what the world looks like once you have been to the area, but once you are not in the area it stops updating and is grayed out or darkening.

This darkening/gray out allows for new things to appear in the world that you do not know about immediately. If a volcano were to pop up or a meteor to strike and change the land, word is going to definitely spread across the world about the changes to the overland. Now maybe you have a little information about the area where this is and so some sort of highlighting the general vicinity needs to occur, but it does not necessarily have to be highly detailed where it is on the map. The overland could be updated or not updated to show the exact location. Some players will want to know exactly what changed and where immediately. Others are going to want to know the general area of where change happened and have to explore. Either way is acceptable. I am personally of the opinion of the latter, as I like to explore.

If special events were to occur, like some sort of festival or fair this can still be added to the darkened map also. If maps exist some form of parchment/paper would also appear to exist to allow for flyers of events to exist. This means that a flyer would be able to tell you where in the world on your map an event is occurring. As a result the grayed out/darkening could be removed from the area of the event as you have knowledge of it, but the surrounding would still be grayed/darkened.

Now does this graying or darkening of the world beyond recently traveled areas mean we need clouds to represent our fog of knowledge? I say no, as the clouds really do not add anything. We still know what the world looks like generally once traveled, so just graying or darkening the colors and not animating dragons/creatures/volcanoes or what not is sufficient. This removes an unnecessary graphical item that will be taxing and that is also limiting. As pointed out in the video the current clouds cause lots of problems with trying to hide what you are not supposed to know limiting your ability to zoom in or rotate the map so as to prevent you from seeing things that you should not know yet. So ditch the clouds as they are not really adding anything.

Ditching the clouds now allows for the map to be rotated. Now Lord British mentioned his fear that players would get lost potentially if they were allowed to freely rotate the map. This will all depend on how far we can zoom out when in the overland map and whether some sort of orientation device exists, a compass. I think a compass like device could be overlaid in any corner of the screen to help give people a sense of direction and this would be sufficient.

A compass would make sense to exist to allow travel at sea. Now maybe initially the boats of the times are not really that well at sea and are easily sunk when they depart from the coast. This would still allow for us to be trapped on the continent that we know, but allow new islands and continents to be discovered once the appropriate ships are developed.

To recap:
1) We start with a rough drawn map as the overland
2) We fill it in with higher detail as we travel
3) As we are away from an area the detail does not revert back to the map, but dims/grays/darkens to show our lack of current knowledge of changes in the area.
4) Special events or changes to the world can temporarily remove the dimming of a location on the map even if we have not been recently to the area due to knowledge gained by flyers or other methods telling us of the changes.
5) Removal of the clouds: a) allows for the map to be rotated to give a better sense of immersion, b) removes graphical effects that is unnecessary and burdensome on weaker computers, and c) removes problems with zooming
6) Compasses exist will facilitate user orientation of the map.

I am not totally sold on the idea of dual scale maps, but I can definitely see the advantages and disadvantages. Time will tell once an alpha exists to try it out.

I am still not sure what is going to happen while traveling long distances between locations. It has been indicated that large mobs will be animated on the overland map. We should be able to avoid these if we choose since we will know where they are, but what about encounters with individual monsters or small groups that are not animated on the overland map? Are we going to have any chance to avoid them or will we be forced to fight them? I think we should have some capability to avoid most battles as we should be somewhat weary of our surroundings. That does not mean we may not be ambushed though.

Another aspect that has not been talked about to my knowledge is how are groups going to be represented on the overland map? If we form a party, are we going to see where everyone is going or will they disappear off the overland map if they go different directions? I hope that in some future Dev Hangout a discussion of how groups will be handled on the overland map.

Sorry for the really long post, but I wanted to help justify my opinions. I hope that the devs still get a chance to see this. I will try to be a little faster about putting up comments to the videos in the future.

 

I was wondering what Dante?s inferno-like scenario was about but I see there is another thread on that so I'll go read that.

 

Looting houses will just make houses useless, death penalties that make a player play vs the ai is zero fun.